I'm new to this forum and I'm interested in buying an Amiga computer. I will use it for playing retro games. And because I will have to buy it from abroad, I'm looking at the "low-end" models 500/600/1200 so I won't pay much for shipping. Of the three models 1200 seems the best choice but is it compatible with most of the classic games? Is 600 compatible with more classic games than 1200? Do many good games need the numeric keyboard?

Quote:

Originally Posted by jimbob

Doesn't matter, whichever one you get first, soon you will feel the need to have one of each, at least.

But yes, for a little more money the most painless solution for retro gaming will be A1200 + CF card + WHDload + PCMCIA adaptor (for file transfer), and preferably something in the trapdoor, (WHDload works best with at least a slice of extra RAM).

^ This is basically it. With WHDLoad you can load games from "harddisk" (most use CF cards now) from a menu, just pick one and it loads quickly! Very nice. You need some time to setup the CF card with WB and games on a PC, but there are also illegally setup CF cards to buy from ePay. You *will* need extra Fast RAM to run WHDLoad properly, period. In total it will probably cost you ~ 180-220 EUR+shipping(s).

But it sounds like you want to run the old games from floppy. For this, you'll need an Amiga setup compatible with all games. In this case, only an A500 or A500+ with the normal slowmem (trapdoor) 512K expansion is un-frustrating enough. This will cost ~ 50 EUR+shipping. Of course you'd have to solve the floppy-making problem, but a 20 EUR Gotek USB floppy emulator is a good and cheap replacement for the internal drive. It can load any .ADF (disk image file) on demand.